


get out (get gone)

by ilgaksu



Series: not just good business [5]
Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Agender Kuroo, Alternate Universe - 1920s, Alternate Universe - Gangsters, Gay Crows, M/M, Multi, Non-Binary Suga, Other, Period Typical Attitudes, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Post-World War I, World War I, non-binary kenma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-06
Updated: 2016-04-06
Packaged: 2018-05-31 16:42:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,306
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6477949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilgaksu/pseuds/ilgaksu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Daichi is sat at his desk when he hears the city breaking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	get out (get gone)

Daichi is sat at his desk when he hears the city breaking.       

He hears the explosions wrack the docks from the wrong side of the city to be hearing it, and faintly imagines he can hear the cough-laugh of Kuroo around a cigarette; hears louder the cackle of Bokuto Koutarou, the crazy bastard; hears himself gasp in hurried  and trembling, the air suspended in his lungs and burning like gas.

They brought the war home with them. It was only a matter of time before it retched itself onto his doorstep, the dust settling and sticking. It was only a matter of time. He hears Suga running, feels the familiar dry tickle in his throat when he opens his mouth to call to them. Shuts it. Mute day, then.  Suga rounds the corner and stops to attention just by the desk. Daichi gestures, shrugs apologetically; Suga's face clouds with a compassion ocean-deep. Daichi glances away.

  
"The docks are burning," Suga says, "Noya says the docks are burning. It came through on the radio. They've done it."

First blood to them, Daichi supposes. He sighs. Raises his hand. Signals.

_ Set off the decoy. _

He notices Suga doesn't say  _ we. _

*

Shouyou loves Kenma; loves them like he loves salted pork from the street-seller or the smell of fresh newsprint or the way his boots make him feel like a giant. He tried to say so once, and Kenma looked at him long and hard and then looked away; rose oil and embarrassment.

Kenma, Shouyou thinks, secretly thinks of love as consumption. They aren't sure what they're giving away by letting Shouyou into their apartment twice a week to listen to the gramophone, but Shouyou's noticed they put out a bowl of sherbet candy each time. Kenma doesn't like sherbet candy.

Kenma is lying on the sofa, watching Shouyou dance barefoot to the gramophone. Shouyou loves his boots like he loves Kenma, but neither of them are easy to move around with unless they want to be moved.

“C’mon,” Shouyou whines, but Kenma shakes their head no, and so he dances on his own. He doesn’t mind and licks the sherbet off his fingers as he spins once, twice, faster and faster.

“Shouyou,” Kenma says; through the blur of colour Shouyou can see, through half-shut eyes, he sees Kenma shift up to sitting, alarmed. “Shouyou, you’ll fall.”

Shouyou giggles. Three, four, five.

“Shouyou.”

“It’s fun, Kenma,” he says, tripping over the rug a little and righting himself quickly. “You wanna try?” He feels rather than sees Kenma shake their head quickly. Laughs, and -

The noise is the loudest thing Shouyou’s ever heard, surely, it has to be, it must be; louder than Natsu crying in her makeshift drawer-cot; louder than Daichi when he gets really mad and calls them all back into line; louder than Kageyama’s moody silences. It sounds like a heart imploding, the reverberating shock of it. This time, Shouyou does trip over the rug.  Kenma moves with surprising speed (surprising for the suddenness of it) and catches him before he hits his head on the table.

“What was that,” Shouyou does not squeak. Kenma glances warily to the window without getting up to look out of it.

“That was Bokuto Koutarou,” they say, then, “Shouyou, they’ll want you back at Karasuno.”

“But -” Shouyou starts. He doesn’t get it. He hates it when they do this, give him the corner piece of a jigsaw and nothing else. He’s not stupid but there’s not a lot you can do with one piece when there’s a thousand. The loudness of the noise ( _explosion_ , his mind supplies, _that was an explosion_ ) is still echoing in his head, the sense-memory of it, and Kenma’s spine has snapped back into its usual anxious hunch, and he’s _not stupid_.

“I’m not stupid,” he says out loud, as he settles onto the sofa, and Kenma turns to look at him. Shouyou automatically puts his head on Kenma’s lap, even though he’s kind of angry at Kenma right now, and Kenma automatically lets him. They brush a piece of hair away from where it’s stuck to the corner of his sugary mouth. Tucks it behind his ear carefully. Shouyou hums a little, again despite himself, breathes in milk soap.

“I know, Shouyou,” they say, and Hinata rolls to smile up at them. Kenma looks away but smiles back.

Of course, it’s then Kageyama bursts in, because Kageyama has always had horrible timing with anything that didn’t have a trigger. He stands there in the doorway, framed like a portrait of long-dead, long-faced ancestors that Shouyou has seen in public libraries waiting for Kenma before.

Kageyama isn’t sulky, exactly, he’s too tense for that, cut his milk teeth on annoyance and just kept on biting. Kageyama’s scowling - was probably cut out of the womb scowling, Shouyou thinks - and it smudges the fine bones of his face. Shouyou thinks Kageyama looks delicate, like an ivory carving, elongated and strange and easy to snap with a careless foot. Kageyama doesn’t cross the threshold, like a vampire waiting to be invited in - Shouyou read about them in a horror comic once - and his shadow reaches out across the rug.

(Shouyou used to want to be tall, and still does, if he’s honest with himself, but one time Kenma told him, words honey-slow, about netsuke and how they were prized for their compactness. It had made Shouyou feel a little less hard done by.)

“You’re supposed to wait for me,” Shouyou whines. He isn’t something to be collected. He’s eighteen, and eighteen is old enough for lots of things. Shouyou dropped out of school gone twelve and he’s made good use of the time in between. Early bird catches the worm, and the call of the newsie has replaced the birds in the Chicago dawn.

“I came to see if you were alright, dumbass,” Kageyama snaps, glancing between him and Kenma rapidly, assessing.  Kenma stands, and Kenma approaches. Kageyama holds his ground.

“Is Kuroo alright,” Kenma asks, and it isn’t a question, there’s no waver. It’s a  _ he better be.  _ It’s a  _ make it so.  _ God remakes man in his own image; Kenma talks back to God and says  _ you missed a spot _ .

“Fine,” Kageyama says, irritated, distracted, maintaining a veneer of politeness. “He’s downstairs. The telephone rang. We should go back, Hinata.” The consonants, like so much of Kageyama, are sharp and staccato.

Shouyou doesn’t want to go back. He doesn’t understand. Why can he smell smoke drifting on the air from the open window? Something must be burning. Why was Kenma unsurprised about the explosion? They must have known. Kageyama seems stressed, not shocked. Did Kageyama know? And what has Bokuto Koutarou got to do with anything anyway? Why does everyone keep Shouyou in the dark?

Bokuto Koutarou knows how to set bones; Hinata saw him do it once, with a Karasuno boy’s leg. If Shouyou hadn’t dropped out of school gone twelve, he might be able to build a metaphor with that; that, and how the look in Kenma’s eyes when they talk about Kuroo makes Shouyou think of the story about Adam’s rib. But he didn’t, and he can’t. Shouyou dropped out of school gone twelve and he’s small fry in this game.

He knows that. He’s not, despite what everyone seems to think, stupid.

He lets Kageyama take him home to Karasuno, and the taste of the sherbert, violent starburst sweet, mixes with the ever-growing smell of smoke from the docks.

*

It’s a quiet day for bookselling. When he comes back from watching the fire engines gush down the roads,  Daichi finds Koushi flipping through a copy of Alice in Wonderland, half an eye on the door to Karasuno.

“Tell Bokuto he can have his book back this afternoon,” Koushi says, their voice neutral. When they look up, their eyes flash mercury-ice. They cross their ankles where their feet rest on the shop countertop, next to the cash register. Daichi looks to the poetry bookcase, then back to Koushi. Koushi raises their eyebrows.

“Go on,” they say, communicating everything with a slow, heavy blink of eyelashes, thick as falling curtains, “Go and tell him.”

Because it’s Koushi, Daichi goes; raps on the fake copy of Frost, quick and fast in Morse, until Tsukishima pulls the hatch back and glares.

“You’ve travelled a long way,” he says, sounding bored, the ennui dripping off the syllables. “This is pointless. I know it’s you.”

“Thirteen miles, as the crow flies,” Koushi replies over Daichi’s shoulder for him, “Practise makes perfect, alright?” and Tsukishima sighs and unlatches the sliding door, and moves out Daichi’s way, and Daichi descends down the rickety metal staircase like Orpheus into the gloom.

There’s two dead men sat on the dancefloor; Bokuto Koutarou is perched on a table, ash and dust thick in his hair, streaking it grey and black with dirt. He’s swabbing a long gash in his thigh, the pant leg ripped off to expose the blood and mess of it. Daichi smells the tang of it and swallows. There’s a needle and catgut next to him on the table, and next to that, Nekoma’s Yaku, looking for all the world like an extremely stressed cat, clothes dragged through the mangle.

“Where’s Asahi,” Daichi signs at no one in particular. Noya, who is leaning forward eagerly towards Bokuto, looks up for a second, face darkening.

“Storeroom,” he says, “Hiding,” and turns back to Bokuto. “He doesn’t want anyone in there with him right now so leave him be, alright?”

Daichi lets it go. It’s something he’s learning how to do. It’s a work in progress.

“You’ve both gone white,” Koushi says, clattering down behind Daichi, looking at Bokuto and Yaku. Daichi vaults behind the bar, grabbing a bottle at random and bringing it back.

“I’m not white, sweetheart,” Bokuto says, pushing the jut of his lip out on the twang of his accent. Yaku rolls his eyes. It’s probably, Daichi thinks, not the first time he’s done that today, and gives him the bottle first. Watches Bokuto tip more disinfectant onto the cloth and clean up the newest bubble of blood without flinching. Daichi remembers suddenly saying goodbye to Bokuto on discharge day, back in 1918, and how when he’d cupped the back of Bokuto’s head in his hand Bokuto’s hair had been worn and soft as a kitten’s tongue.

“Got your headline,” Bokuto says, and laughs. “Clever. Came here before the fifth one even went off.”

“You smell like a sewer,” Tsukishima says, and Bokuto laughs again as Yaku sniffs his own collar and pulls a face.

“You’re quick,” Bokuto says, “There’s a reason for that, kid.” Tsukishima’s mouth scrunches up in distaste at  _ kid,  _ even as his eyes flicker, the look in them similar to how the clack-clack-clack of a train on tracks sounds. He gets it fast; abandoned sewer tunnels, rigged explosions, Ushijima’s docks burning up the skyline. Bokuto, head of Fukurodani, sat on the table with surface wounds and dirt on his collar. Yaku, right hand to Nekoma’s leaders, next to him downing the bottle like it’s air to a drowning man. Maybe he can’t figure out why Yaku’s here and not Kuroo. It wouldn’t be Kenma; Kenma doesn’t like getting their hands dirty. And Kuroo couldn’t hack the sound of explosions in Chicago, not at close range; Daichi remembers the days when the thought of going home had been Kuroo’s morning prayer.

They couldn't have sent Kuroo; and Daichi wonders at that, calling them  _ they.  _ Nekoma are not  _ they.  _ They are  _ them,  _ they are golden-eyed Other here in Chicago. This isn't France, and Daichi isn't Kuroo Tetsurou's commanding officer anymore. They do not share a trench, a hospital bed, a nurse. It's 1925. It's a new era. And still Daichi calls them  _ they.  _ He's a creature of habit; Koushi laughs at him for it, silvery and soft-eyed in the night, laughs Irish-brash at tradition whilst Daichi traces constellations into their shoulders. It's why Daichi loves them, with the sort of insistent ache that he's never been able to brush off.

When they were sixteen years old, Sawamura Daichi stood on Sugawara Koushi's doorstep, wringing his hat in his hands in the Irish district whilst housewives raised their eyebrows at Karasuno's heir turning up in their neighbourhood. They went to the same Mass on Sundays, Daichi watching the sickle-moon curve of Koushi's hands around a prayerbook, but they sat in separate pews; the rigidity of sermon and race, Daichi's grandmother dark in her widow's mantilla at his side, the slippery bolt of want that raced down Daichi's spine when he watched Koushi mouth the  _ Our Father _ . When they were seventeen years old, Koushi had grabbed Daichi’s wrists and put his hands on the bare skin of their hips, raised their eyebrows and said  _ you can touch me,  _ and Daichi didn’t know how to stop.

Daichi never knows how to stop. He imagines it’d be easier. He doesn’t really know.

He’s trying. It’s a work in progress. Isn’t everything?

*

So here’s the backstory: one Sunday morning when Daichi was ten, he woke up to the sound of the radio turned up too high, and he knew that his mother and his grandmother were keeping company in the other room with Ukai and Takeda. This happened every second Sunday of the month, but today it was unusual: it was the first Sunday of the month. Daichi wondered what was happening, sleep-blurry, but he could see the ice in the washing bowl from here and didn’t bother getting out of bed to check. He wonders if he had checked, whether that would have changed anything; one night, years later, he said this through a mouthful of drink and Koushi had frowned, silverfast, their eyes minnows, and they’d said:  _ you were a child, Daichi. _

Back then, he knew them as the two friends of his dead father’s, who had taken his mother’s hands at the funeral. Takeda’s eyes were tear-shining and he said  _ I’m so sorry; Sawamura told us to help you with the boy; we’re going to get you through this winter together.  _ Well, Daichi doesn’t know. He was four. He’s imagined it often enough that the tears, the tremble of Takeda’s bottom lip, the stoic shadow of Ukai at his side all feel as worn as a memory in his own mind.  _ You were a child, Daichi. _

So Daichi went back to sleep, the crackle of the radio blaring out through the apartment, and in the other room four adults plotted out the life, reeducation and assumption of one Sawamura Daichi.  _ You were a child, Daichi,  _ and here Koushi’s face had twisted sudden, ugly and bitter,  _ and who listens to children, anyway? _

*

They aren’t all Kuroo Tetsurou, who took the last option standing and flogged it till it bled for him. Some of them were born to this.

*

“We have a problem,” Koushi says, stood in the doorway of Daichi’s office. Bokuto and Yaku are long-gone, slunk back to wherever they go to sleep. Because it’s only Koushi and because Koushi has never been only, Daichi feels safe to put his head in his hands.

“Hit me,” he takes his hands away from his face to sign, and usually Koushi would laugh, but they don’t. Shit. “It’s bad?”

“It’s bad,” Koushi says, “We’ve got a new one.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Daichi says out loud, surprising them both.

*

 

"You can't do this," Tsukishima spits. Daichi looks at him, all nineteen years of growth spurt and scars, and sighs. The set of Tsukishima's shoulders says rage but his eyes say  _ don't,  _ say  _ no,  _ say  _ please.  _ Daichi swallows and finds his voice again. Sometimes the mute days don’t last. As morning bled into afternoon, his voice has been on the return, but he’s always hesitant to use it in the hours after a bout in case it sounds rusty, shaken, obvious. In case you can hear the guilt that chokes him up in the first place. The doctors say there isn’t anything wrong. They say he is physically intact. His voice isn’t really gone when he finds himself unable to speak. His mind’s just hidden it. _Psychosomatic_ , they said. _Surprisingly common in ex-officers_ , they said. _Have you considered electroshock therapy_ , they said, and at that point he left before Koushi dragged him out.

It comes back. It always comes back. Daichi just wishes he had more time to wait for it to.

"Do you think I _ like _ the idea," he retorts. His voice sounds fine. He thinks. "I don't. I don't like a fucking bit of it. But I'm damned if I'm going to let your friend walk about there, all fattened up for the crows. And don't tell me you don't care about that, because if you didn't you wouldn't have dragged me in here like a stay of fuckin' execution."

"He'll get himself killed," Tsukishima hisses. "He's a fuckin' babyface, you've seen him."

"Yeah," Daichi said. "The freckles are a nice touch."

His name, which the kid had said, low and murmuring whilst his hands shook and he shifted from foot to foot on their dancefloor, is Yamaguchi Tadashi. He’s a Methodist from Karasuno’s district of influence. He’s slight and young and has the face of a choirboy, with eyes that flash now and again like a banked furnace under the timidity, enough to be interesting. And now everyone in the area had seen him walk into Karasuno in the middle of the day, he was Daichi’s problem; if he didn’t take the dumb kid on and give him some protection, someone would jump him the minute he left, one of the smaller or bigger gangs infringing on Karasuno turf and wanting to send a message. He is Daichi’s to carry now. Yamaguchi knows that, probably planned the daytime excursion to throw himself on Daichi’s mercy; he’d likely not get taken on else, and Daichi can’t decide if he’s impressed by the foresight or too busy resenting it.  _ Am I getting known as a soft touch _ , Daichi worries.  _ Is the talk on the streets getting under my skin? Are they getting too close to the bone?   _

"He's always freckled easy," Tsukishima replies, sounding distant; when Daichi looks up, surprised at the shift in tone, Tsukishima's eyes are Elsewhere, drawn back into the dark softness of his past. Daichi knows Tsukishima grew up in the Jewish Quarter but Yamaguchi went to the Methodist school; Daichi wonders how they met. Doesn't ask. None of his business. "His mother tried to convert my father," Tsukishima answers without Daichi ever having to question. He's unusually open.

"Convert?" Daichi echoes, not meaning to press it but surprised. Tsukishima shrugs, eyes averted.

"Yeah, if throwing herself down for him like manna in the desert counts," he explains with his trademark bitterness. "Met in the divorce courts."  Ah. It happens. Less in Daichi's childhood than others; divorce causing dissolution of that which God had joined, et cetera, et cetera, priest from the pulpit on a Sunday morning and Daichi half-drowsing in the thick syrupy light until his grandma elbowed him needle-sharp in the spleen.

"So," Daichi says, "You gonna try and barter him out? You're smarter than that, Tsukishima."

Behind his glasses, Tsukishima's eyes glint, opaque and gold as coins.

"You're right," he says coolly, slipping his hands into his pockets and leaning forward, "I am."

“...Okay,” Daichi says, scanning Tsukishima’s face. “Where are you going with this one?”

“I’m going to offer you a deal,” Tsukishima says; Daichi almost laughs, then takes a look proper at Tsukishima’s face. Holy shit, the kid isn’t kidding. He’s gunning for this one with absolute seriousness (although Daichi sometimes wonders if there’s anything Tsukishima doesn’t approach with absolute seriousness, there’s something earnest about the kid even when he’s trying to appear disaffected). Daichi could knock him down for that, would be within his rights to. He calls the shots, not some upstart nineteen-year-old from the Jewish Quarter with light copper eyes and a desperately practised nonchalance. You have to work your way up at Karasuno. Ukai had beaten that into Daichi from early adolescence; nothing in life comes free, and if you want to be respected, you gotta pay upfront, in cash and fear and the snap of bones in alleyways.

(“I just think about it as capitalism,” Ukai used to say, smiling toothily. Daichi, his head crammed full already with shellfire, doesn’t think about it all. He doesn’t have the space to spare.)

But Daichi is not his predecessors, is more than the shadows of his gangster ancestry, and so he doesn’t.  

“Go on,” he says wryly, “Surprise me.”

Tsukishima can hear the irony, Daichi can tell in the way his eyes flash. He expected him to. Almost feels a little proud. Not a lot gets past Tsukishima.

“He can stay,” Tsukishima begins slowly.

“Of course he can stay,” Daichi says sharply, “If I call it, he can stay.”

He’s left Yamaguchi waiting on the dancefloor, but Daichi knows leaving him hovering is a pretence of choice. He is Daichi’s to carry now.

“But if he does,” Tsukishima carries on, and it’s only the rapid blinking of his eyes that betrays any sort of hesitancy, “He doesn’t go anywhere near none of it. None of the guns or knives or any of that shit. He doesn’t touch them. He doesn’t get put in a place where they’re gonna get used on him.”

“He doesn’t get any of the fun,” Daichi says. Tsukishima scowls. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”

“He stays  _ safe _ ,” Tsukishima snaps. “ _ That’s _ what I’m saying.”

Daichi smirks.

“You’ve shown your hand there, kid,” he drawls. Tsukishima flushes. “Come on, I’ll let you finish anyway. Brought up to let a man finish talking.”

Koushi says he’s a good listener, whatever that means; Daichi’s learnt to be. People give away a lot more than they mean to, even when they’ve got the sort of charm and polish that Tsukishima painfully, blatantly still lacks. Daichi thinks briefly of Kuroo Tetsurou, who laughed about being gone for Kenma whilst his eyes were great gaping wounds. Sometimes, it’s hard to believe Tsukishima and Kuroo lived in the same tenement once, three floors apart until another landlady said the word  _ abomination _ and Kenma packed their things to fit in one suitcase. And other times -

“And if you don’t -”

“What, no bribe?”

Tsukishima ignores him.

“If you don’t, I’ll ditch on you. I’ll head over to Nekoma and beg on their doorstep. Heard they’ve got a taste for strays and,” he shrugs pointedly, “I get the feeling that Kuroo wouldn’t mind taking me in.”

Daichi winces, imagining it. It’s not so much the loss of Tsukishima - which would be a loss, it really would, they need all the hands they can get and Tsukishima’s good at his racket - as much as imagining Kuroo’s smug face at every meeting for the next year, at least. To be honest, Daichi could be on his fucking deathbed and he’s pretty sure Kuroo would come to sit and eat grapes and remind him of that one time a Karasuno defected to Nekoma.  _ Oh, how the mighty have fallen, Daichi.  _ Daichi grinds his teeth at just the thought.

“Do we have a deal?” Tsukishima says, leaning forward, eager and straining underneath the disaffected eyes. He knows he’s won. He senses Daichi’s wavering. One day, someone isn’t going to like Tsukishima’s smart mouth, his bored eyes, and they’re going to put them out. It doesn’t have to be Daichi. Breaking this boy’s hands won’t break the arrogant stretch of his spine. It doesn’t have to be Daichi. Stalemate never wins the war.

Daichi nods once.

“Get out of my sight,” he says, and Tsukishima does, a little paler than before.

*

Shouyou is complaining under his breath, to himself, newsie cap pulled down and boots pulled up over darned socks, about Kageyama’s fancy suit that clings to his skin. It’s moth-wing soft, expensive, a leftover from his teenage years as the Great King’s pet sniper before the rise of his successor. Shouyou has never seen Oikawa Tooru’s father - has only ever seen Oikawa at a distance - and so in his mind, the last Great King is a shadow-puppet silhouette, with ever-increasing stints in a private hospital upstate. He has only ever seen Oikawa Tooru at a distance, but Shouyou knows how Kageyama’s eyes look up close when Oikawa’s name is mentioned; oily, and bitter, and a little desperate.  _ Defector.  _ If only Kageyama had gone back to Aoba Josai, back to his mother; Shouyou’s got nothing against bastards but Kageyama Tobio is one in every sense of the word, and he gets all the good jobs. He’s never running newspapers back and forth, Karasuno to Nekoma to Fukurodani to Karasuno all day long like he’d never quit with the paper boy act in the first place. He knows there must be a message in the newspapers - he’s not stupid. He’s not. He’s a decoy. That’s better than a trickshot. That’s better than Kageyama. Shouyou’s chest aches.

Then he hears hollering; then he sees four of the Johzenji crowd round the corner of the street, and Shouyou doesn’t run but his heart races all the same. Running is suspicious. Maybe they haven’t noticed him? He watches his shadow grow tall and fearsome in front of him; under the patch of streetlight, and squares his shoulders, and he does not run. 

“Hey,” he hears. His breath quickens, and his lungs sing with adrenaline. “Hey, we’re talking to you! Hey, shorty!”

Slowly, Shouyou stops. He turns around.

Shit, that’s Terushima.

“Running after the big boys again?” Terushima’s got a shit-eating grin and a minor stronghold on the docks. He acts like twelve blocks is its own goddamn principality and one time he bothered Kiyoko at a dance hall so much she nearly reached for the knife in her garter. He’s also effortlessly, enthusiastically charming. Shouyou hates him. “It’s late to be carrying on with the papers, ain’t it?” His eyes, dark in the gloom, drop to the newspaper Shouyou has tucked under one arm. “Don’t they all want those with their breakfast?”

This is the thing about Terushima; underneath the guilelessness of the party boy act, there’s flickers of something as ugly as the rest of them, something blood and bone and splintered. This is the thing about Terushima; he’s smarter than he looks and far, far smarter than he acts. He knows something’s off, and he’s going to needle Shouyou until he can get through the cracks of it. Shouyou, who doesn’t know anything but isn’t stupid, knows that there are cracks but not where they are. He swallows and hopes they don’t notice. Glances to where two more have appeared, lounging casually against a wall, smoking, eyes gleaming, ash glowing. There are no trees this part of the city, but Shouyou understands the concept of a wildfire.

This is the thing about Terushima; he’s an arsonist down to his bones.

Shouyou is focusing on Terushima’s smile, the teeth in the dark, and so doesn’t notice for a split second that Terushima has lunged towards him, hand outstretched to grab the paper. Shoyo ducks under his arm and whirls around, faster. The night air ruffles his collar, damp with sweat, and Shoyo can taste salt on his lips.

“The fuck does Sawamura see in you, runt,” Terushima mutters, and Shoyo thinks: _there it is. There you are. Here we go._

_Keep your hands up,_ Kageyama had told him, voice steady. _Keep your hands up. Don’t be afraid to go for the eyes. You have to make them hurt. You hear me, dumbass? You have to make them hurt. You have to make it hurt so much they step off you._

When Terushima’s second grabs Shouyou in a headlock, Shouyou bites them so hard he hits the taste of iron. He lets the newspaper fall to his hand and holds on. _I have never been stupid_ , Hinata thinks, and keeps his teeth locked in until they let go. He drops the newspaper, despite himself; the pages slip and scatter, and he feels the first brief blurt of panic. He hits the ground hard and jarring.

“Do I gotta do everything myself,” Terushima says, and steps forward to grab Shouyou, who scrambles up and darts behind the streetlamp, shaking and alight.

“Wow, Yuuji,” Shouyou hears and sees Terushima’s face go slack, then tense. “Nice to see you’re still chasing after people when they can’t see your face.”

“Fuck off, Kuroo,” Terushima snaps without turning. In the half-light, Shouyou sees Kuroo Tetsurou shrug. His hand is in his pocket. Shouyou can’t hear a gun click, but piano wire, stilettos, bicycle chain: all of those are silent.

“You think you’d have learnt better than to fuck with crows; those lot eat the dead.” Kuroo’s voice is pleasant. Shouyou thinks of Kenma this morning, _ is Kuroo alright _ , the anxious crease between their eyebrows. Shouyou doesn’t know why Kenma bothers. Kuroo Tetsurou would get out of his goddamn coffin if it meant getting up in somebody else’s business; Shouyou is too annoyed at him ruining Shouyou’s chance to get one over on Johzenji for Karasuno to remember he’s scared of Nekoma’s leader. He blocks out the rest of Shouyou’s view of the street, lean and assured and taking up all the space Shouyou was carving out to prove something tonight.

“Since when was Karasuno’s runt any of your fucking business,” Terushima huffs.

“I’ve got nothing better to do,” Kuroo says, and Shouyou bristles at that, “And Kenma’s sweet on him. Save your fights for the shit you can win, Yuuji. Maybe try for daylight robbery, next time. You’ve got it in you.” His smirk is tacky as syrup, sticks in your teeth the same. Terushima’s lot look to him, uncertain: it’s one against six, but Shouyou can’t be the only one thinking of Kenma’s cold gilt gaze right about now, of their new Russian mafia brat with the New York accent, of looking over your shoulder for cat’s eyes in the dark.

Terushima spits on the newspaper, and makes sure to walk over it as he leaves, but he doesn’t spit on Shouyou and that makes him feel less small. When the six of them trail off for better pickings, none of them look at Kuroo.

“Want a hand?” Kuroo says quietly, watching them slope away. He offers it without waiting for Shouyou’s reply, picking up the papers.

“No,” he replies and grabs them back, though Kuroo doesn’t let go. “They’re a night delivery for Fukurodani. They don’t sleep.”

“You’re telling me,” Kuroo snorts, but he isn’t looking at Shouyou, he’s looking at the page in Shouyou’s hand, eyes hard and alert. Shouyou glances down and sees it; pinpricks across page twenty, invisible without the glare of the streetlight, dotted just under letters. His hand goes slack and Kuroo gives a tug. Shouyou looks up, startled and then trapped in Kuroo’s glare.

“I’ll take them to Bokuto,” Kuroo says, and it’s too late, it’s too late, Shouyou’s a runt but he’s not stupid, and Shouyou says,

“Special delivery, sorry,” and yanks them back, the pages of the newspaper littered with pinpricks and secrets, and runs off down the street, the breath rushing in his ears, and Kuroo lets him go, his eyes a dark, unsettling weight in Shouyou’s back and Shouyou -

  
Shouyou runs three blocks in the right direction, just to make sure, then ducks down by the nearest streetlamp, licks the last of the salt off his lips, turns back to page twenty. Takes a big gulp of air to cool the thrumming of his blood. And Shouyou begins to read, because decoys still have eyes. Decoys are still part of the game. 

Decoys, very occasionally, win wars. 


End file.
